“Unless he deliberately leads the wolf here, he isn’t responsible for what it does,” Marlow said. “I’ll talk to him, but if it happens again, you might want to consider leaving town over the full moon. It could break the compulsion.”
Victor sneered. He was a good-looking man, pretty rather than handsome, but not with that expression on his face.
“Why should I have to do that?” he asked. “Why should I have to be the one to leave? He’s the one tormenting me.”
Victor had a point. The problem was, wolves didn’t listen to reason or restraining orders, and they couldn’t make Barney Lyons do anything he didn’t want to do until he did something wrong.
“Just a suggestion,” Marlow said. “Hopefully, it won’t be necessary.”
The cleaver slashed and embedded itself in the bloody chopping board. A freshly severed fish head wobbled in place and stared at Marlow with blind black eyes. Barney scooped it up and tossed it in the pot with the rest.
“I’m well rid of Victor.” Barney wiped his hand on his apron and then grabbed the fish to butcher it. The knife sliced along its underbelly from tail to gills, and he scooped out the innards with hooked fingers. “Did he tell you what he did to me?”
“He did.”
Barney snorted and swung the cleaver again, this time to sever the fish’s tail. The flicker of light on the razor edge made the back of Marlow’s neck itch. It was a reasonable conversation so far, but his instincts twinged each time Barney’s arm tensed.
“Bet he didn’t,” Barney grunted. “Not all of it, anyhow. As far as I’m concerned, I’m lucky that I only wasted a few months.”
“Three, wasn’t it?”
“I suppose.” Barney scraped the cleaver over the board and flicked the tail into the trash by his foot. “Better than three years.”
Marlow leaned against the counter, just out of arm’s reach. The din of the kitchen eddied around him: the splash of running water, hiss of gas, and sizzle of fat on a skillet. Waiters delivered orders through the pass-through in rapid-fire shorthand that the chef then chopped up into brusque, barked orders.
“The wolf doesn’t seem to agree,” Marlow pointed out. “Mr. Clemons thinks you’re doing it deliberately.”
Barney smacked the cleaver down on the cutting board and turned to face Marlow. He wiped his hands on his apron, pink blood and scales smeared over the gray-white fabric.
“You know why he thinks that? Because everything is about Victor in his world,” he said, an acidic bite of sour humor to his voice. “That house? That’s my house. My garden. My neighborhood. I lived there first; he was my roommate. That’s why the wolf goes back there. It’s nothing to do with him.”
He pointed a finger at Marlow’s face to underline his point and then went back to work. Two quick strokes of the cleaver filleted the fish into neat steaks, and he started on the next.
“It might be an idea to go away next full moon,” Marlow suggested. “Out of town. Break the habit.”
Barney snorted. “Why should I do anything?” he asked. “It’s his problem. Get him to go away somewhere.”
The sullen resistance in his voice was familiar. Marlow bit his tongue. It was the easiest, proven way to avoid problems with a passive compulsion—one that neither side was encouraging—but if neither party would budge, he couldn’t make them. There was a legal difference between being okay with the idea your ex might get eaten and taking steps to make it happen.
“Just a suggestion,” Marlow said. He stepped to the side to let one of the porters reach through and grab the pot of fish heads. “However, if you do consciously use the wolf to break the restraining order, then that is a serious offense.”
“Yeah?” Barney slapped the fillets down on a metal tray and grabbed a bottle to drizzle lemon-tinted oil over them. “Prove it.”
He used the tray to jostle Marlow out of the way as he headed for the ovens. Marlow let him pass and dropped his hand to his belt, fingers looped through the clip of zip-cuffs attached to the leather.
If he wanted to be difficult, that was close enough to a confession, and he could pull Barney in over it. The charge wouldn’t stick, not when Barney could claim he had just talked big, but it might scare the man enough he’d actually take Marlow’s advice.
Probably not, though. Not with a couple of weeks between the lesson and the full moon. Thebluefull moon.
Marlow made a mental note to tag the neighborhood as a place of interest next month.Hedidn’t believe in moon madness, but he wasn’t the problem. People that wanted to do something stupid would jump at the first excuse they got to justify doing it. If Barney broke the restraining order, they could grab him before the wolf turned a crime into a tragedy.
He flicked a stray scale off his sleeve and headed out of the kitchen. One of the porters caught him at the door and pressed a package of what smelled like fresh fish cakes into his hands.
“For your service,” the woman said.
Marlow juggled the waxed paper parcel—they werehotfresh fish cakes--and tried to give them back, along with an awkwardly grateful refusal, but the woman put her hands behind her back.
“Night Shift saved my neighbor’s life,” she said. “What’s a fish cake to that?”
